Quotes About Salvation

The Messiah died for our sins in accordance with the Bible" and its own great narrative. We are not at liberty to replace this with narratives of our own.

work of salvation, in its full sense, is (1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; (2) about the present, not simply the future; and (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us.

Victory over the powers, once more, is accomplished through the forgiveness of sins.

Because of the cross, the world as a whole is free to give allegiance to the God who made it.

When Paul talks in his letters about 'the gospel', he doesn't primarily mean 'the way you too can get saved'. He means 'the message that says that Jesus, the crucified and risen one, is the Lord of the whole world'.

How we are saved is closely linked to the question of what we are saved for.

Christian mission means implementing the victory that Jesus won on the cross. Everything else follows from this.

The reign of the crucified Jesus only had to be announced for it to become effective.

God loves the world so much that he will not allow it forever to wallow in the corruption and decay into which the rebellious human race has plunged it.

What God was doing through the Torah, in Israel, was to gather "Sin" together into one place, so that it could then be condemned.

Jesus died for our sins not so that we could sort out abstract ideas, but so that we, having been put right, could become part of God's plan to put his whole world right. That

True, the doctrine of purgatory was not so popular outside Roman circles in the nineteenth century. But "penal substitution," which had been emphasized partly in order to ward off that idea, then found a new home in the Western piety that focused not on God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven, but on my sin, my heavenly (that is, nonworldly) salvation, and of course my Savior.

Heaven's rule, God's rule, is thus to be put into practice in the world, resulting in salvation in both the present and the future, a salvation that is both for humans and, through saved humans, for the wider world. This is the solid basis for the mission of the church.

But of course you can only do what you're meant to do with a baseball bat when you're playing with other people. And salvation only does what it's meant to do when those who have been saved, are being saved, and will one day fully be saved realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them.

Christians have assumed that virtually the only point in Jesus's death was "to save us from our sins," understood in a variety of more or less helpful ways. But for the gospels themselves, that rescue of individuals (which of course remains a central element) is designed to serve a larger purpose: God's purpose, the purpose of God's kingdom.

enjoined on all Jesus followers—takes place in the context of the initial victory won on the cross.

Paul and all the other early Christians, what mattered was not "saved souls" being rescued from the world and taken to a distant "heaven," but the coming together of heaven and earth themselves in a great act of cosmic renewal in which human bodies were likewise being renewed to take their place within that new world.

the victory of the cross will be implemented through the means of the cross.

The passage has regularly been read as the vital move in the wrong story— the story, once again, of a "works contract" in which, to put it crudely, humans sin, God punishes Jesus, and humans are let off. This omits elements that were vital for Paul

Christianity is, simply, good news. It is the news that something has happened as a result of which the world is a different place

Jesus, the Son of God, the truly human one, is leading his people to their promised land, and is available for all people and for all time as the totally sympathetic one, the priest through whom they can come to God. Following Jesus is the only way to go.

God's covenant with Abraham and through Israel for the world was there precisely in order to deal with sin, as "the Jew" in 2:17–20 knows and claims.

Paul is the classic example of the early Christian who has woven resurrection so thoroughly into his thinking and practice that if you take it away the whole thing unravels in your hands.

Christian people of the Western world—have not been ready to recognize Jesus himself. We want a "religious" leader, not a king! We want someone to save our souls, not rule our world! Or, if we want a king, someone to take charge of our world, what we want is someone to implement the policies we already embrace, just as Jesus's contemporaries did. But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?